


After

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 01:23:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17012889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: Yuan had stared from a distance until he made sense of her face, Kratos at his shoulder, and when he saw her smile he couldn’t help but hope for a moment, just a moment, traitorous heart leaping—It wasn’t her. While Kratos was occupied with Lloyd, Yuan had slipped away, hoping no one would bother to follow.In which the Spirit is not quite Martel, Kratos is annoyingly sympathetic, and Yuan is informed about the benefits of facing the future.





	After

“You should go to see her.”

The voice at his door wasn’t Botta. Botta was dead, Yuan reminded himself. He flipped to the next channel of communication devices, pinging any Renegades he had sent away who might yet respond, and didn’t turn to see Kratos. “I’ve been.”

That wasn’t what Kratos meant, of course.

After saving Kratos’s life there had been other things that needed Yuan’s attention; it wasn’t just not wanting to see or face Kratos. He’d hunted Kratos down later, at Lloyd’s adopted father’s house, and they’d leaned against each other and Kratos had finally bothered to start healing himself and somehow they had laughed together, mana-drunk and marveling at the world made new again.

Then the others, Lloyd and his friends, had returned, and insisted that they go to see the Tree, and Yuan couldn’t manage to get himself free of it. And then—

Yuan wasn’t seeing the display in front of him any more, but the spirit of the Tree again, and his heart lurched unhappily. It was one thing, to have let Martel go and know he was doing the right thing, and another entirely to see her face again, living.

It was the spirit, not Martel. Yuan had stared from a distance until he made sense of her face, Kratos at his shoulder, and when he saw her smile he couldn’t help but hope for a moment, just a moment, traitorous heart leaping—

It wasn’t her. While Kratos was occupied with Lloyd, Yuan had slipped away, hoping no one would bother to follow.

And here Kratos was. All the way in Triet, in what remained of the Renegade base there. Not terrible, not destroyed as Yuan had half-feared, only battered and abandoned. The Renegades weren’t needed for the same purpose now, and they were in no danger from Mithos, but there was still work to be done in the new world. Hence Yuan’s current task.

Yuan calculated the odds that Kratos would follow from his office to his room, and found them higher than he’d prefer. Damn. That was too much like running, which was making an acknowledgment that he didn’t want to face what Kratos was trying to offer him. Instead Yuan stared at the lit display, seeing nothing, minding only that Kratos was still standing in the door.

Kratos stirred eventually, coming a few steps farther in. Not enough that Yuan would be able to get around him; Yuan stayed where he was, staring at the display and _not seeing Martel_. “You looked at her,” Kratos said finally, slow and deep and not irritated in a way that anyone but Yuan would hear. “You didn’t speak to her.”

“Don’t mistake me for you,” Yuan returned almost instantly, waspish as a matter of course. “I see no reason to voluntarily inflict pain on myself.” Martel was dead. “I have things to do. Was that everything?”

He didn’t look up to see how reproachful Kratos’s expression might get. Yuan had seen that face enough, even if it was only a minute shift, to summon the image mentally. “She wants to talk with you,” Kratos pressed on, implacable and inexorable.

“Whatever you think you’re doing, it isn’t going to help.” Was Kratos hoping for violence? He might be healed enough by now that Yuan could oblige without feeling guilty about it. Yuan flexed his hands against the scarred desktop and finally pushed back, standing. Still making up his mind about whether to turn and face Kratos or not. “Martel is dead. Speaking to a spirit wearing her face won’t set me any further at ease.”

Kratos’s footsteps combined with the easy similarity of his mana signature meant Yuan could track him without eyes, and so he didn’t flinch when Kratos set a hand on his shoulder. The decision was more or less taken out of his hands; Yuan let himself be turned, meet Kratos’s gaze. Trying to decode meaning out of minuscule shifts in a stoic face was an old and easy habit to fall into, but all Yuan saw was understanding.

How dare Kratos _understand_ and still ask. Yuan’s jaw clenched, and he looked past Kratos’s hair instead. “Stop looking at me like that. What if it were Anna, whose face she wore?”

The hand on Yuan’s shoulder loosened, and Yuan knocked it aside, moving finally to brush past Kratos. It was low of him, perhaps, but that had never stopped him before. “I still have Renegades to recall. If that was everything.”

“You’re going the wrong way for that, Yuan.” Kratos’s voice was patient. Yuan did not respond, or even look back, striding the empty halls instead. He wasn’t running.

Neither did he intend to go and see the spirit of the Tree.

The locks still responded to a bit of mana. Anyone else would have had to bother with a sorcerer’s ring to form it. Yuan fed the base raw lightning and it opened for him, and his steps carried him out to where the desert sun fell across his face blaze-warm and near-blinding.

Kratos was already there, waiting for him in the glare. If Yuan had been paying attention, he’d have felt the shift of mana as Kratos moved the angelic way. As ever, Martel had consumed Yuan’s thoughts. Even when they were pointedly not thoughts of her, they were defined by her absence.

He saw Kratos seeing him, and for several long moments neither of them said anything. Yuan could anticipate clearly how this might go— he would turn on his heel and go back inside, and Kratos would follow him, just stoic enough to edge right under his skin. And again, and perhaps again, back and forth if Yuan were inclined to keep it up. It wasn’t something that would have happened ten or a hundred years ago.

Four thousand years ago, it would have. Everything old was made new again, and without the jubilation and the headiness of the moments of the reunification, Yuan didn’t know what to do with it.

 _I can’t_ , he said finally, a thready plea of a thought that could never have passed his lips. _Martel is dead_.

There they were, then. They’d lost everything but each other; and even that, they’d both strived for at one point or another.

But— no. Kratos had Lloyd, didn’t he?

Yuan didn’t know what emotions were showing in his face. Turning and going, if only so Kratos couldn’t _look_ at him with that awful sympathy, was sounding better and better.

“Perhaps she is,” Kratos agreed aloud, gentle in a way that scraped Yuan’s nerves raw. “Consider then that the spirit of the Tree has one last message for you from her. Will you still turn that aside?”

His eyes burned hot, and he couldn’t answer.

 _Trust me_ , Kratos said, earnest. _Please_.

Damn it all. But the fight went out of Yuan in a rush, and his shoulders dropped from his instinctive defensiveness, weariness settling there instead. “Fine,” Yuan said, clipped, and turned his head aside just enough so he didn’t see Kratos’s face. “…Now?”

That was a question that didn’t even merit an answer for how obvious it was. Yuan waited there, watching shadows and movement from the corner of his eye, till Kratos was in arm’s reach, and when he was Yuan took the outstretched hand.

A measure so Kratos was assured they traveled together, that was all.

Nearly as one they reached out, and found the lines of light and life that girded the world, changed and familiar all at once, and they stepped toward the beacon at the center that was the sapling Tree.

Yuan released Kratos almost at once, taking several steps away and making a habitual scan of the surroundings that really wasn’t necessary. The rubble of the Tower had mostly settled, shored up in some precarious places that might have tumbled by this point otherwise. Here the sun hung lower in the sky, limning everything with a rich golden edge.

At the center, in the soft soil revealed by cracked stone, the sapling lifted new leaves to the sun; and beside it, a sweep of fabric, a fall of hair the color of spring—

The traitor heart leapt again. It wasn’t her. Yuan turned automatically away only to be met with Kratos, implacable and solid and _damn_ him trying to be kind. Abruptly angry with everything there, Yuan jerked his chin up, prepared to tell Kratos to move, and—

“Yuan,” said the spirit of the Tree. Yuan stopped.

Her voice was higher than Martel’s had been, for all that she said his name the same way. The urge to flee rose in Yuan again, halted only by Kratos in front of him and the sense of barely contained lightning and movement.

Trust Kratos. Trust— the spirit.

“Yuan, will you come here, please?”

Yuan drew breath, slow and conscious and sharp at the back of his throat, and he turned toward her.

Now that he was braced for it he could see the differences in her more clearly. The way she bore herself, perhaps. The leaves woven into her hair, growing from it. Eyes a fraction of a shade lighter, the color of the Tree’s new growth. An infinitesimal difference, surely; but the Cruxis crystal Yuan wore had kept some memories of Martel sharp as if they’d only met years ago.

He studied her more closely, like prodding a healing scar to see how much pain it yet brought. At length, the spirit extended a hand, palm-up. From Martel, it would have been asking. Here it was beckoning.

It still hurt.

Heartsore, Yuan went to her.

Her empty hand remained between them. Yuan waited a pace or two from her, trying to think what to say that wouldn’t make emotion get the better of him.

She was taller, too, than Martel had been. Good. Better that there should be more difference.

“I am the spirit of the Great Tree,” she said to him, “and I am all those who were sacrificed to it; I am mana, and I am Martel.” There was a pause then, as though to see how it took him.

“Martel is dead,” Yuan said, not quite automatically. Conscious denial. “Do not try to give me hope _now_.”

The spirit shook her head, slowly, deliberately. “Martel slumbered in the Seed for four thousand years,” she said. Her words came hesitant but not soft, someone who knew the concept of gentleness from observation but not precisely how to shape it for herself. “One could not exist without the other; as I could not exist without Martel. I was shaped by her form and her mana and her love for this world, and so there is no better name for who and what I am than hers.”

Perhaps it was fitting, in the end, that such a boundless love for the world and the people in it was embodied by a half-elf. Yuan could not bring himself to see much poetry in it. “I cannot help but see her,” Yuan admitted at last, voice low and rough.

“I know.”

Temper might have sparked, but for the face Yuan could not unsee. “What do you want from me?” He couldn’t tell. Wariness and grief and confusion held him rigid and watching.

The spirit took a step toward him, then another. “Breathe, Yuan,” she said more softly, and he realized that he had been forgetting to. Not that he technically needed to, but the fight to remember that he, too, was mortal in the world had been graven in him for a long time. The fact he could forget shook him, and his hands too were shaking finely before he curled them into fists at his sides.

Breathe. Feel the emotion; be with it, acknowledging it as companion and truth, for a full three breaths before doing anything with it. Yuan took air into his lungs again, and again, and the spirit of the Tree closed the distance and folded her arms about his shoulders.

Yuan bit his tongue so he would not speak, and he closed his eyes, unmoving. The weight of weariness threatened to bow his head.

The spirit carried a different scent, and leaves that might have been the Tree’s brushed his ear. Like this it was almost impossible to mistake her for Martel, for the mana in her was the life of the world, potential unchecked and growing with the force that let plants split even the mightiest of boulders.

Tangible proof that the worlds were made new, and the Tree reborn. Everything they’d once fought for, brought to fruition, though not without cost. The joy of it was raw in him, curling around the still-present knife of grief.

Yuan let his head drop finally, resting against the spirit’s shoulder, too confused even to ask what she meant.

“Remember,” Martel said in his ear, and her voice was low and sweet. “Always remember I love you, Yuan.”

Stubborn to the last, Yuan disabled that part of himself that could weep, though his eyes stayed hot and aching. The spirit had been made from Martel’s love, she’d said.

No wonder, then, that she held him. Only the peculiar surreality of having a spirit’s arms about him, and the echo of Martel’s words hanging at his ears.

And somehow Yuan felt comforted by it, and couldn’t say why.

He didn’t move till he was sure he could do so and retain his composure; when he did he stepped back, and the spirit let him go. This time he could meet her eyes. “Thank you,” he said gravely, voice credibly even.

She tilted her head at him. Her expression could be affectionate. “Will you stay?” she wanted to know. “The Tree is young yet, and needs the care.”

So much more meaning was carried in what she said; it dizzied Yuan, the enormity of what she seemed to be asking. “I,” he said, and stopped, and tried again. “…I can’t, yet. Give me time.”

The spirit considered this, and nodded an agreement. “Come back,” she said, “when you can. I would like to see you again.”

Yuan nodded in turn, sharper, shorter, and turned half away, pressing the heels of his palms against his stinging eyes. “I’ll come back,” he promised, and finally gave in to the urge to flee.

Kratos had given them space, was not immediately in evidence as Yuan went, but all the same Yuan did not make it more than a few meters over earth and rubble before Kratos appeared again, a question apparent in the angle of his head and the lift of his brow.

“I still have things to do,” Yuan informed him, making a show of brisk irritation and not bothering to slow his stride more than a little. “I’ll be back. Are you happy now?”

“Ecstatic,” Kratos provided, with a careful sort of dryness, and stepped in front of Yuan to force him to stop. “Yuan.” _Are you all right_?

Yuan scowled. It was easier. _No. …But with time, I may be._

Kratos moved too fast to defend, and Yuan was off-guard; he barely had his hands up before Kratos now had arms around him, and Yuan made a choked-off, furious sort of a sound. “Do I _look_ as though I need to be held like an infant?” he snarled when he had words again, and Kratos stayed infuriatingly, solidly stoic.

“If you’re going to act like one…”

Damn it all. Yuan weighed the effort of struggling, which would turn into fighting Kratos, versus the still-creeping weariness of too much emotion, and paused to deliver a token elbow to Kratos’s ribs before subsiding. “I hate you,” he muttered into Kratos’s shoulder, ugly and petulant and not at all suiting his actions to words.

“I’m aware,” Kratos agreed. Punching him seemed more tempting by the moment.

Yuan breathed, and breathed again, and didn’t punch Kratos, but did note that the violet fabric of his shoulder was dampening slightly.

At least there was this. _Thank you_ , Yuan said, where he didn’t trust his voice, and he leaned into Kratos, and any admission of comfort was surely understood.

**Author's Note:**

> Written something like a year ago, now excavated in a hard drive tidy. Tada!
> 
> To no one's surprise, Yuan is made of pain.
> 
> If you have curiosities about any of the worldbuilding choices, I am happy to ramble at length, because oh boy, I've been in this game for fourteen years and I have Some Feelings.


End file.
